"Four or five months after that May morning he took me to stay at a château in Brittany; a very beautiful, tumble-down, draughty place, my dear, standing proudly at the head of a valley like a dissipated actor who feels that he must have done great things in the past to be what he now is, and with nothing to show for its draughty arrogance but a few rakish stones which were once the embattlement from which the Huguenot _seigneur_ of the day defied the old Medici; and the slim, white-haired old woman who charmingly met me at the door, the châtelaine of only one castle, but with the dignity of an empire in her kind, calm elegance. My hostess and my guardian were old, old friends, and to watch them in their gentle, courteous intimacy was a lesson on the perfect management of such things. When we are old and white-haired, will you come and stay at my place, Dikran, and will you pretend that you have forgotten that you ever liked me for anything else than my mind? Just like those two old people in the Breton château, who a thousand years ago may have been lovers or may have only loved one another.... Who knows? and does it matter? "The idea of this visit, on my guardian's part, to the solitary château from whose highest windows one could just see the sea curling round the Breton coast, was of course excellent. He wanted me to be out of harm's way and entirely his own, and was there any better way of achieving that than by putting me in a lonely château with only my hostess as an alternative to himself? But, poor old dear, it didn't fall out like that; for we had only been there two days when the alternative presented himself in the person of the young man of the house, my hostess's son, the young lord of Tumbledown Castle.... He went and spoilt it all, good and proper, did that young man. His mother hadn't expected him, my guardian didn't want him, and I didn't mind him--there he was, all the way from England on a sudden desire to see his mother, the only woman whom Raoul had ever a decent thought about, I suppose. (His name wasn't really Raoul, you know, but it is a sort of convention that all young Frenchmen with the title of Vicomte and with languid eyes and fragile natures are called Raoul.) For he wasn't by any means a nice young man, except facially, but how was I to know that! And besides, the man could sit a horse as gallantly as any young prince who ever went crusading, and I strained my eyes in prolonging the little thrill I had when, the morning after he came, I saw him from a window riding out of the gates and down into the valley, very much the young lord of the manor, on the huge white stallion which, with such a master, defied a Republic and still proclaimed him as the _Sieur du Château-Mauvrai_ to the dour and morose-minded peasants of the Breton villages....